If history teaches us anything, it's not to meddle in the middle east

An apocryphal remark attributed to various US Presidents from FDR to LBJ about various Latin American dictators from Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic to Cuba's Fulgencio Batista defined American foreign policy in the 20th century: 'He may be a b*****d, but he's our b*****d'.

What this meant in practice was that Washington was happy to support any number of unsavory regimes around the world, providing that the countries concerned were friendly - or at least not unfriendly; pro-capitalist - or at least anti-Communist; and could be relied upon not to challenge US interests. So, from Spain's Franco to Indonesia's Suharto, and from Chile's Pinochet to Zaire's Mobutu, dictators - sometimes mass murdering dictators - enjoyed Uncle Sam's blessing.

The result was a Pax Americana in the western world in which a blind eye was turned to 'human rights abuses' under less-than-democratic regimes in return for those regime's broad agreement to toe the Washington line. When there was a serious threat that a leftist or otherwise hostile Government would successfully challenge this cosy arrangment, Washington went in hard - sometimes very hard. Guatemala in 1954; the Congo in 1960; Brazil in 1964; the Dominican Republic and Indonesia in 1965; Greece in 1967; Chile in 1973 - these are just a few examples of occasions when Washington intervened, using the CIA and/or the local Army to prevent a hostile regime from taking over an American asset. Hypocritically, when Britain and France tried the same game at Suez in 1956, it was the US which used its financial muscle to stop the adventure in its tracks.

Occasionally the policy failed. Notably in Cuba in the early 1960s; and of course in Vietnam. But by and large, the Pax Americana was maintained for three decades after World War Two. One notable beneficiary of the policy was Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran. Brought to power in a coup organised by the CIA (with a little help from our own MI6) against a left-wing nationalist Premier in the mid-1950s, the Shah ruled (none too gently) and modernised the oil-rich state until 1979 when the hurricane of the Islamic revolution blew him away. Humiliated by having its embassy staff seized as hostages by the triumphant revolutionaries, American prestige under the weak Presidency of Jimmy Carter took a further nosedive when a airborne rescue mission was horribly bungled.

Humiliated: Protesters occupy the United States embassy in Teheran in 1979

Since that devastating and far-reaching event, western influence in this most vital region, has been on a steady downward slide. Despite its victory over Soviet Communism in the Cold War, America and its Allies have been drawn into one disastrous Middle Eastern failure after an other. The milestones of this melancholy descent have been 9/11 leading to the disastrous invasion of Iraq; the futile involvement in Afghanistan and finally the so-called Arab Spring, which as anyone with half a brain (excluding BBC reporters, obviously) could see a year ago, has rapidly become an Arab winter of the deepest perma-frost.

Over the past year one Arab country after another: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria - have been convulsed by civil unrest and/or outright violent revolution. Dictator after dictator has been toppled - to whoops of delight from well-meaning western liberals - and, most mysteriously, since they don't have the liberals' excuse of ignorance and naivity - from western governments too.

Civil unrest: Protesters in Tahrir Square, Cairo

Apart from the feudal Saudi dynasty, America's favoured boy in the Middle East, the recipient of large lumps of US cash and weaponry, was Egypt's long-ruling dictator Hosni Mubarak. Unlovely though the Mubarak regime was, with its one-party state and torture cells, at least it kept a sort of stability in the region, and made a fourth Arab-Israeli war unthinkable.

A year ago, the administration of Barack Obama, a dithering dolt of a President who makes Carter look like action man, encouraged Mubarak's downfall - then affected to be surprised when the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood scooped most of the votes in the subsequent elections, while a Salafist loonier-than-thou movement hoovered up the rest. It was the same story in Libya, where the horrible IRA-supporting veteran dictator Gadaffi was ousted and murdered after a bloody civil war in which the US, Britain and France provided the Islamist insurgents with bombs, and inexplicably, and one hopes briefly, our own RAF became the air arm of a militia army, many of whose cohorts were Al Qaeda veterans. Now Libya's jails are groaning with the cries of tortured detainees, and freedom and democracy look more distant than ever. David Cameron's brave words when he orchestrated the intervention that led to Libya's 'liberation' ring pretty hollow today.

Brutal: But what would be the consequence of the Assad regime's downfall?

Now, all eyes are on Syria, where in a steadily worsening conflict, the brutal secular Assad family dictatorship, backed by Iran, has been fighting an all-out war with the Sunni majority of its own population. As with Libya, calls for the West to intervene and stop the killing are growing ever louder. But if and when the Assad regime crumbles - what then? It would take a very optimistic - or a very foolish - observer who would bank on the next regime, born from bloodshed out of tyranny, being any better than the Assads. In truth it will probably be a great deal worse.

So now, one year after the Arab Spring began ,we are faced with a region already ruled by, or about to be taken over, not by Liberal democrats who could share a nice cup of tea with Nick Clegg, but by obscurantist thugs who hate and loathe everything the West stands for. And we have enthusiastically helped bring this disaster to birth. Never was the old proverb 'best hang on to the nasty nurse, for fear of finding something worse' more apt. The new movers and shakers in the Middle east are quite likely to be more nasty than we can imagine.

Time was when an FDR or an LBJ could send in the Marines or get a quiet American from the CIA to organise a coup to deal with such a little local difficulty. That time is long gone. Western meddling in the region, fuelled primarily by our insatiable thirst for oil, had been one long litany of disaster since Lawrence of Arabia first bribed the Bedouin to rise up against their Turkish overlords in 1917. Virtually every move we have made since have been maladroit mistakes - often very bloody ones. As we contemplate the unfolding of yet another cruel bloodletting in these benighted lands, history teaches only one lesson: stay out of the whole appalling mess. And look elsewhere to meet our energy needs.